1) You wrote Lowlife Underdogs, or at least parts of it, while confined to a hospital bed. I don’t want to ask you anything too personal, but do you think a good writer has to endure a certain amount of suffering?
Good writers can fool you, easily. But those who have undergone true, individual suffering have the ability to place upon you an emotional attachment to the character and their situation. The writer who has known true suffering can inject certain knowledge and perspective into their work that those who have not dealt with such troubles could imagine to create. It is sincerely honest, putting your emotions on display for readers to absorb; bringing them to confront the pain, rage, tears and the sorrow you have lived through.

2) Like the antagonist Bella in Helen Zahavi’s Dirty Weekend, you’ve created a character in Party Girl who takes the proverbial witch-burning torch back from those who want to do her harm. The story serves as a warning to perverts, deviants and bastards everywhere. Would you agree that a lot of so-called hardboiled fiction consistently uses women, children, gay people, the elderly and other outsiders like lame murder ballads to sell books or shock?
Yes, I would agree. Too many have created worlds where blood and bare breast is more important to the endeavor than creativity and originality; plot, theme, and motive, character and symbolism have been erased and replaced by the man’s man view of the world. The creator has given up producing intelligent work and the viewer has given in. Casting out and disposing of those seen by the masses as weak or different; it’s tasteless and insulting. I hope the future brings with it a new generation of artists who are not afraid to challenge the current culture and muster enough strength and persistence to change film and written fiction.

3) What takes you to dark places?
Life, whether virtuous or somber, is a passageway for darkness. The challenge of being human can take you to places worse than any piece of fiction.

4) What was the first story which marked you for life?
There is no doubt that Clive Barker was the first writer who genuinely frightened me, shook me up. His Books of Blood series stands out in my memory as a defining read. I do not remember what story first caught me, but without hesitation I can state honestly that somewhere inside the Books of Blood I became inspired.

5) And finally, do you wear your heart or your cock on your sleeve?
Well, my heart… but there sometimes comes along that special someone who switches things up…

On Ian Dury: “He remains a one-off, a flawed genius, as well as a reminder of how beautiful and alarming a humble pop song can be”. * Art writers. * The history of the London Tube map. * “…Bacon‘s sado-masochistic relationships lay at the heart of his best work”. * The miniskirt as political weapon. * All Tomorrow’s Parties. * Heidegger the scumbag. * On Richard Hell‘s Destiny Street Repaired: “Unwittingly, Hell had written the new version into the original script: the title tune is a recitation of a short story about a man stepping back 10 years and seducing his younger self”. * God Help the Girl.

On several occasions I met [Salvador Dalí]. He was pretty unpleasant; not directly unpleasant – he wasn’t nasty. He was a major artist, but I felt he lacked integrity. I was there once and during the course of the evening we were given some horrible sweet sparkling wine which was palmed off as champagne. I met his wife Gala once as well when we first made contact, although they didn’t answer letters and I had to go to his suite in a hotel on the rue de Rivoli. He was into money, so if something made him money he was interested. He said to me, ‘Dalí loves money. Have you brought me some?’

Director of the film Grotesque – banned in the UK – Koji Shiraishi talks movies and horror with David F. Hoenigman. Shiraishi says:

As the person who made it, I wanted to make something that was impressive, and then the producer said, “I want you to make something horribly violent, so violent that it almost can’t be shown”, as these were my orders, I embraced the challenge of making something stirring and emotional while portraying extreme violence. I wanted to portray people who withstood as much one-sided merciless violence as possible, who were unable to fight back, but who never entirely succumbed, not even in the end. I was also, as a director, interested in portraying the feelings of one who’d commit such crimes, so I didn’t want to abandon that angle. I thought merging these two things would be interesting. I kept that in mind as I made the film.

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Post-Nearly Press are publishing two volumes of in-depth interviews with Chris Petit and Iain Sinclair, both conducted by Neil Jackson. Only a limited number of copies will be produced. “When they’re gone that’s it,” says Neil, “it’s a theme that crops up in the conversations.”

The Sohemian Society presents… Jeremy Reed at The Wheatsheaf, 25 Rathbone Place, North Soho, W1 Wednesday March 18th, 7.30pm The Dilly is the first comprehensive examination of male prostitution at London’s Piccadilly Circus from the nineteenth century to the present day. On the fringes of Soho, Piccadilly has long been London’s principal location for the […]